Maharashtra sets stage for elections to 29 civic bodies with ward delimitation order

Mumbai: In what would be a step further for holding the long-pending corporations, the Maharashtra government has set the ball rolling by using a notification to draw and finalise the ward boundaries in the 29 municipal corporations including Mumbai.

The civic polls are pending in Maharashtra since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the notification, the number of corporators to be elected to the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation, the civic body of the financial capital of Mumbai, has been capped at 227, with each ward in Mumbai electing one corporator.

The other municipal corporations will have four corporators per ward, a number that may vary between three and five.

The ward delimitation process will proceed with the approval of the State Election Commission (SEC).

For Mumbai, the BMC commissioner has been tasked with preparing the draft delimitation plan.

The notification directs that the city’s population, as per the 2011 Census, be divided by the number of corporators to determine the average population per ward.

Of the 29 municipal corporations, nine are in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region including Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Kalyan Dombivli, Ulhasnagar, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Panvel, Mira-Bhayander and Vasai-Virar.

Polls are also due for municipal corporations of Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nashik, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Nagpur and Amravati.

One of the crucial factors is the elections to the BMC, the richest and one of the biggest civic bodies of Asia.

This year, the BMC presented a whopping Rs 74,427 crore budget for the financial year 2025-26. The total BMC reserves stand at Rs 81,744.42 crore. Such financials are bigger than that of some small states in India. The BMC has been divided into seven zones which have 3 to 5 wards each. In total, Mumbai has been divided into 24 administrative wards which are further divided into 227 civic electoral wards or constituencies. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the NDA in Maharashtra got a drubbing, however, the BJP reversed the situation in the Vidhan Sabha polls and won 230-plus seats in the 288-member Maharashtra Legislative Assembly.

Now in the wake of Operation Sindoor and the way the Narendra Modi-led government handled the situation, there is a wave of support for the BJP.